Misguided
For the last year or so I have sparred with a handful of characters that insist newbie developers learn XHTML as oppose to HTML5. Their number one argument is compatibility issues. I find this so misleading and ridiculous to say the least. For starters, XHTML was never fully compatible with all browsers. With that in mind, why bother learning something that is soon to be obsolete. If you are not quite sure, do your research. Furthermore, if the powers that be were to continue developing future versions of XHTML, backward compatibility would become a serious issue. At some point the problem would be solved, but at what expense.
It’s 2012 and the number one driving force on the web is portable devices. I am not yapping about your laptop, today is all about tablets and smartphones. Using XHTML for a standard pc or mac is fine. However these new lightweight devices might yield some unexpected results. Most importantly, HTML5 offers so much more features. From a developers point of view, my biggest issue with HTML5 in the beginning was the hierarchy of the section and article tags. Outside of that, I could not imagine how incredibly easy this was to grasp.
I cannot speak for others, but it feels good not having to be concern about “strict” or “transitional”. I never really wasted time on finding out the point of it, but I did run into an issue where I had to update a site developed in “strict” DOCTYPE. I found it to be a bit of a pain, but doable. There are a host of other issues I have not touched on regarding my migration from XHTML to HTML5, and I will leave it at that. My reason for writing this post was not to compare the two, but to promote progression. Like Lou-Lou said in PIF “This is the wave of the future baby!” Telling a newbie to learn and stick with XHTML is just flat out wrong. However, it makes quite a bit of sense if you are trying to stifle the competition…